Comment by stefanha
5 days ago
In Linux (Wayland) you can copy text from the terminal without pressing Ctrl+C at all. Just select the text. To paste it in another Window, press the middle mouse button.
This is called the Primary Selection and is separate from the Clipboard (Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V). IMO the Primary Selection is more convenient than the Clipboard.
That's an X11 thing that Wayland had to reimplement because it's so convenient. The problem is when pasting into the terminal something that another program copied into the clipboard. That's ctrl-shift-c.
I thought about remapping copy and paste to their own keys, possibly a single one. Maybe on the number pad, which I never use. Or remapping ctrl-c.
There's always Ctrl+Insert for copy and Shift+Insert for paste. I know that there's some laptops lacking an insert key, which is terrible, but for keyboard with an insert key the Ctrl/Shift + Insert combos are useful at times.
Especially because one does not have to push three keys with the same hand, which is not nice to tendons. I think I did that for a while time ago, then forgot about it. Thanks.
1 reply →
Isn't this an X11-ism? I dont believe this is Wayland-specific
Yeah I know. I missed this for the first couple days, but didn't take much before forgetting it after the change to Windows. (anyway I keep using Linux at home)
This is also a thing in X, not only Wayland.
But that doesn't go into clipboard history. And severely restricts what you can do between copying and pasting in general (very importantly makes it a pain to do replace (i.e. select+(implicit-delete+)paste)) as any intermediate selection before pasting destroys your Primary Selection. And if you realize you did that, recopying takes manually reselecting the text, or the otherwise-never-used ctrl+insert to recopy, instead of just repeating the same old ctrl+c as you always do with the clipboard in any sane application.
Of course still a nice option (esp. in terminals where the proper copy/paste are nerfed and selecting for editing is annoyingly not a thing), but far from a replacement for the proper clipboard.
How do you paste the selected text if you want to replace a text selection in the other window?
>middle mouse button
Speaking for myself (although I suspect many others), I haven't used a mouse in well over a decade. To be clear, I am in the terminal all the time. So this is not a universal solution.